


who's in your heart now?

by flannypack



Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1990s, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Cyndi Lauper - Freeform, FUCK yea babey, Kang Taehyun-Centric, M/M, Sweetheart Huening Kai, Whipped Huening Kai, also the setting is somewhere in new york, and yeonjun is the MANAGER, kai is referred to as 'longboard boy', kang taehyun is a mess, record store employee kang taehyung & choi beomgyu, skater boy huening kai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27466354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flannypack/pseuds/flannypack
Summary: “Twenty minutes,” Taehyun said, speaking into his sandwich but knowing Longboard Boy heard him.“My break, I mean... there’s a stool at the end of the counter.”--the mysterious brunette with the blue longboard appears for a second time at the record store taehyun works at, just to loiter and flirt with him again.
Relationships: Choi Beomgyu & Kang Taehyun, Huening Kai/Kang Taehyun
Kudos: 55





	who's in your heart now?

**Author's Note:**

> this might be a series 90's adventures make my brain go brr

“Taehyun!” 

Yeonjun’s voice came, strained, from the back room just behind Taehyun, seconds before he emerged with his face twisted up in irritation. Taehyun turned from the cassette case to face him a second too late, barely catching the handle of a dust mop Yeonjun flung towards him.

“I’ll finish wiping down the glass, the fucking closing shift forgot to dust-mop the break room again.” 

Taehyun pressed out a sigh and nodded, taking the broom with him as he made his way into the back of the store.

Ever since Yeonjun’s dad went back to Korea at the start of spring, leaving Yeonjun as sole shop manager, the guy’d been practically pulling his hair out from all the inherited stress, Beomgyu once even saying he thought he for sure could see a bald spot appearing on Yeonjun’s head from his hair follicles just throwing their hands up under the pressure. On top of it all, Taehyun was positive that Yeonjun was genuinely no less burdened by his nonstop loop of nagging than the people he was nagging at. Of course, the store wide knowledge of Yeonjun’s being strong-armed into the delicate balancing act of both keeping up with his music courses, and staying on top of his sole managerial duties, gave everyone a collective, general sense of pity and understanding. 

Taehyun shuffled along the breakroom cabinets, putting his earphones back on from around his neck as he swept so he could pick back up from where he’d left off on the new song he’d been chipping away at. He’d taken up the personal mission to chew on Nirvana’s _Nevermind_ album, a recommendation by Yeonjun since they’d had it in-store for a few years now and got questions about it from a group of pretty girls the previous week. The discography was good, but that came as no surprise, since Yeonjun and Taehyun owned practically identical music collections, which Yeonjun always accredited for earning Taehyun his job at the record store.

Taehyun stopped bobbing his head for a second to peek out the doorway and watch as Yeonjun pulled open the store gates, flipped over the faded yellow placard in the door from “closed” to “open hours”, and started turning on all the neon store signs strung up in the windows. 

“Hey, forget about it,” Yeonjun yelled back to Taehyun, briefly looking back at him through the sliver of the break room doorway. 

“Just come out to the floor and start organizing the CDs. Beomgyu’ll be here in an hour, he’ll finish up.” 

\----

Beomgyu’s fist collided with Taehyun’s rib cage, immediately making Taehyun’s initial easy process of simply chewing and swallowing his BLT into an whole ordeal, where, in between coughs, he started trying to punch Beomgyu back. 

“Beomgyu, you know you can tap me? You can tap my arm? Really, you don’t have to slug me as hard as you possibly can?” 

Beomgyu yelped when Taehyun ditched his sandwich on the display case and freed up his hands so he could use both to try and make a grab for Beomgyu’s shirt collar. Beomgyu successfully managed to wrench Taehyun’s hands away with a high cackle.

“Caught you slacking, dweeb, it’s called a sneak attack!”

Taehyun landed a good slap on the side of his neck. 

With a hand shooting up to caress his already reddening skin, Beomgyu started the wind up with his other hand to return the favor. However, he stopped mid-swipe leaving his hand suspended in the air, and he froze as his attention was suddenly cast over Taehyun’s shoulder. It fixated on whoever it was that just came through the front of the store, the sound of the door hitting the bells that hung in the door frame coming over the soft rock playing on the speakers.

“Hey, what—?” 

It wasn’t at all like Beomgyu to surrender so flaccidly, so Taehyun whirled around on his stool to pass his own judgement on whatever was apparently more interesting than a round of slapsies. Like he was struck with the same bolt of lightning, Taehyun immediately stiffened where he sat.

“... oh.”

The boy’s brown hair was blown back by the wind, exactly like it’d been the last time Taehyun saw him, and his skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Now standing at the display case with his robin’s egg blue board under his arm and a brown paper bag dangling in his hand, yesterday’s mysterious Longboard Boy looked down through his messy fringe and donned his lop-sided smile, which he unflinchingly aimed right at Taehyun.

He looked like he’d been prepared to meet Taehyun’s eyes again with every last ounce of his attention, the very instance he had another chance to. His eyes were like two earthworms that got dropped in wet dirt.

Taehyun stumbled on his breath; he could only do that for so long. Nonsense heat broke out and up his neck, and across all his extremities before he could equip another coherent thought. 

Feeling sufficiently burrowed into, for somebody who was still practically a stranger to the Longboard Boy, Taehyun peeled his eyes away and put them somewhere else, clearing his throat in very loud silence.

“Hey guys,” the Longboard Boy supplied.

Beomgyu leaned over against the display case past Taehyun’s left side, putting his chin on a palm then placing his elbow on the glass. 

“Hey you! Lunchbreak was turning into a drag,” he chirped. 

Taehyun could see out of the corner of his eye a skinny fist of Beomgyu’s raising and Longboard Boy’s own promptly bumping into it. 

For as long as Taehyun’d known him, Beomgyu had been an expert at filling back up all the holes of faux-pas Taehyun would dig up and abandon, for better or for worse, even if he only had a garden shovel. If Taehyun would actually appreciate it was often times a toss-up, but he could be honest with himself, and right now he appreciated it immensely. 

Yeonjun liked to say the reason Beomgyu was so good at it was because, his head was always so vacant that filling it with social adeptness whenever he wanted to was practically a cake walk. In the absence of the conflicts of interest between all the thoughts Beomgyu wasn’t having, there could literally only exist a thriving coalition, a perfect alliance between how to be cool and actually being cool. Watching the way Beomgyu picked up the conversational scraps Taehyun littered everywhere around new people—around Longboard Boy—with charming ease, Taehyun had yet to find a single hole in Yeonjun’s logic. 

“It wasn’t.” Taehyun said. Not that he meant to sound so terse, but everybody liked slapsies, what else could he have said?

Beomgyu drawled, cool and contrary, “No, it was,” then laid across the display case in a way that made Longboard boy squint his eyes and giggle. 

“Uhm, well,” Longboard Boy said. He clasped onto Taehyun’s gaze in the same determinedly open way he did before, when he caught Taehyun peeking up at him. Taehyun’s hand shot out to pick back up his sandwich, although he wasn’t feeling particularly hungry anymore.

Longboard Boy placed his beat up paper bag on the counter, Taehyun still feeling his eyes on him.

“I wanted to, uh, give you thi-”

“Twenty minutes,” Taehyun said, speaking into his sandwich but knowing Longboard Boy heard him. 

“My break, I mean... there’s a stool at the end of the counter.” 

Taehyun gestured to it, and glimpsed at the way Longboard’s smile unfurled further from it’s previous close-lipped state. You mean he could smile _more_? More than he was smiling already? Taehyun wanted to feel affronted—before his very eyes a single flower suddenly turned into a dozen. A scientific impossibility, an anomaly that could only be explained by God. 

The swell of excitement was full-bodied, Beomgyu acknowledging it with a snicker and Taehyun saying nothing. Longboard Boy’s whole body turned into a flower bed as his shoulders straightened up, and he nodded his head at Taehyun before he went to grab the stool.

“I, I came to actually buy something this time,” he started, setting down his board on top of the display case before he could start dragging the stool around to the front of the counter. Taehyun nodded some, taking a small bite from his sandwich and staring at his fingers while Beomgyu sat up next to him. He expressed for everyone the surprise of hearing that Longboard didn’t just come to loiter around the cash register for the duration of Taehyun’s break again.

“You’re kidding,” he said, laughing when Longboard Boy flushed, laughing more as he shook his shaggy head.

“No seriously!” Longboard Boy squeaked. “I saw you had, uh.”

When he paused he quickly reddened even more. Taehyun almost wouldn’t believe he was seeing it if he wasn’t also, probably, just as red. 

“I saw you had Cyndi Lauper, in the back I think, or something.” 

“Oh, I _now_ am convinced,” Beomgyu teased, not mentioning Cyndi Lauper even though most people would’ve laughed. Taehyun wouldn’t have laughed, wouldn’t have even sniggered. He loved Cyndi Lauper, he owned nearly all of her records. 

The doleful magic of Time After Time was lost on his Pearl Jam groupie friends, but Taehyun would imagine he was Cyndi herself, sprawled out in a sorrowful, sexy starfish shape on his bed with his dad’s whisky glass full of chocolate milk in one hand and his bedsheets clutched in the other, belting at his despairing ex-lover in the ceiling fan: “ _if you’re lost, you can look and you will find me, time after time_ ”.

Taehyun felt his heart kick in his chest and wanted to hide. The echoes of Cyndi’s croon were melting him, melting him into nothing and everything.

“Well, also, I…” Longboard Boy got up on his stool in front of Taehyun, then reached to nudge the paper bag a little closer to him. 

“... brought this… I don’t know you’re- if you have uh, like, allergies. But um.” 

Taehyun couldn’t watch—much less be in the center of it. Molten lava filled him up from his toes to the tip of his ears, and he hid further and further behind his sandwich while a war was waged inside of him. To one side was the anxious curiosity about what Longboard Boy could’ve possibly brought in the mysterious bag, and to the other was the impulse to say, actually, he was deathly allergic to everything. 

“My family, er—well, my dad I guess, owns the, uh, the little chocolate shop? Down forty-eight West avenue. Just a couple blocks from here… you know, German chocolate, heh.” 

Of all the trillions of businesses the Longboard Boy’s dad could’ve inherited, and it had to be a chocolates chain. Taehyun’s stomach flip-flopped so much it could’ve separated out into milk and butter. 

Beomgyu shook beside him, reminding Taehyun to breathe. 

“Chocolates—wait, you’re _German_? Wait wait wait, I’m bugging, you haven’t even told us your name!” 

“Oh, yeah. Shit, my bad.” 

Longboard Boy turned to Beomgyu and put out a hand, which was slapped and then shook once. Beomgyu snapped right after their hands separated, which meant Longboard was officially inducted.

Taehyun reached his hand out and felt goosebumps erupt across his arms as he realized Longboard took his hand much, much more gently than Beomgyu’s, carefully, almost, and shook it only once before letting it go.

“Sorry, heh, Huening Kai Kamal. I mean, that’s what my associates call me, my friends just call me Kai. You can call me whatever, whatever you want is good.” 

“ _Associates_ ? Dude, this is the second time you’ve bummed around our cash register without buying anything or stealing any cash. _He’s_ my associate,” Beomgyu pointed a finger at Taehyun. “You can be my friend.” 

Longboard Boy—Kai—must’ve seen Taehyun’s expression change because he straightened in his seat and worried his eyebrows, waving a hand at Beomgyu like he intended to talk him down from the slander as he looked back and forth between him and Taehyun.

Before he could say anything, Taehyun elbowed Beomgyu, hard, who let out a wheeze of a laugh, then tore a bigger chunk out of his sandwich and stuffed it in his mouth. 

“You’re a record store employee, nobody here is your ‘associate’, we’re your coworkers.” 

Kai seemed to relax a little then, shuffling around on his stool as he huffed out some laughter and looked straight into Taehyun’s eyes when he smiled. 

“Fine, be a good employee and introduce yourself to the customer, _coworker_ ,” Beomgyu giggled, shoving Taehyun’s shoulders. 

The desire to finish the slapsies that they’d started almost overcame Taehyun for a second, but he felt pacified under Kai’s reinvigorated stare—smothered, even. He turned back to the brunette and paused, glimpsing between his yellow screen-print tshirt and the mole above his left eye. 

“Taehyun Kang,” Taehyun said, trying to hide his dry swallow with a bite out of just the tomatoes. His own voice sounded foreign to him.

“Taehyun,” Kai parrotted, and suddenly Taehyun imagined pulling out a little bag of treats, puppy treats, to put in Kai’s hand and reward him for “speak”, thinking it in the briefest second of fascination. Taehyun had always kept a distance between himself and big dogs, yet they always seemed to have an inexplicable charm, in the same way people liked riding roller coasters or swimming with sharks. Maybe Taehyun could trace back the trembling in his stomach, he realized, to the fact that Kai constantly looked like he was five seconds from sprouting a pair of puppy ears and a tail.

“Yeah, _Taehyun_ ,” Beomgyu’s voice smirked as much as his face did, “and I’m Beomgyu Choi. Want me to leave or something? The chocolates aren’t for me…” 

Kai looked like he was sent into the mildest of panics. He sputtered and reached for the bag, but didn't open it or take any chocolates out, only squeezed it in his hands and drew it the tiniest fraction closer to himself. 

“W—well, uh. Um, hah.”

“Dude.” Beomgyu leaned back from the display case and rolled his eyes. Taehyun watched him carefully and his stomach floundered, he didn’t think he wanted Beomgyu to leave but what if he actually did? He wished he could see himself in the future, the future so freaking contingent on Kai.

“I’m not even on my break anyways.” 

Damn. 

“But when I am I’ll get back to you.” 

He backed away from the register and stepped out from behind the case, pointing at Taehyun like he couldn’t be any more blind to the oceanic peril he was leaving Taehyun in. Taehyun tried to promise with his eyes that he’d five-star the other side of Beomgyu’s neck for this later, but he didn’t look like the message was transmitting. 

“Lauper’s in ‘Last Decade Hits’, each section is marked with a sign. Lemme know if dweeb central can’t help you find it.” 

And with that, he was gone.

If Kai did have puppy-dog ears, Taehyun would see them perk up at the same time as he turned back to Taehyun and let go of the bag. 

Taehyun would admit it, because if he didn’t he’d become despondent. Kai was fucking cute, and Kai was fucking _hot_. And Taehyun wanted to know more about him, wanted to suffocate maybe a little beneath his eyes. For as much as the thought scandalized him, it made him want to live all the same. Kai was an open door that dropped infinitely on the other side.

“Dweeb central?” 

Taehyun met his eyes then slowly let himself smile. He set down his sandwich for the last time and curled his fingers around one side of the bag, pulling it from Kai’s hands and towards himself. 

“I guess. He must’ve forgotten my actual name.”

Kai laughed. It was a deep, airy chuckle that wasn’t grand or anything, but it came out alongside a gust of air from Kai’s chest like it was something that’d been waiting to escape from him. 

“Yeah. He scared me. I, uh. I like him, but they aren’t.” 

Taehyun blinked. 

“What?” 

“The chocolates. They aren’t for him, they’re for… you.” 

Taehyun felt like there had to be some health issue associated with blushing so hard for so long. He felt like it was making him stupider. 

The bag crinkled mildly under his fingers. The paper was that soft and malleable texture, like the bag had been reused.

“Thanks…” 

“Do you have classes tonight?” Kai suddenly said.

His voice had become quiet, and the shadow of him cast on the newspaper littering the top of the display case felt like it’d grown closer. 

Stilling, Taehyun realized he’d almost forgotten what happened last week. 

Kai’s first visit to the shop was suddenly just as fresh in Taehyun’s mind as it’d been right after it happened, forcing last Monday into the present when he thought Kai’d left it behind himself a week ago. 

Taehyun had been sitting in the same stool at the front shop’s cassette display case, in front of the same intense shaggy-haired boy, that time appearing without a brown paper sack, but wearing the same exact yellow tee, and carrying the same exact scuffed-up longboard. His face was imbued with open anticipation as he awaited Taehyun’s answer to a question Taehyun hadn’t prepared to receive.

“ _Are you busy after your shift today?_ ” 

Taehyun’d locked up, he’d never been able to lie under pressure, not even to save his life.

 _“I have night classes._ ” 

After Kai left, Taehyun learned Beomgyu had been listening the entire time, and that Taehyun was an irredeemable hardass. More than that, he probably sent the wrong message, and Taehyun would never get to see Kai’s face again to apologize. 

“ _You are so fucking lame_.” 

“ _You couldn’t have expected me to lie, Beomgyu_.” 

“ _Holy shit, dude, apparently no one on the face of planet Earth can_.” 

No, Taehyun didn’t have night classes that evening. Color theory was on Mondays and Wednesdays, and it was an inclimate Tuesday, March 25th. 

Taehyun cleared his throat, then turned over his wrist and looked at his watch. 

_3:20 PM_. 

Kai sat up and followed him with his head as Taehyun got up from his stool and started to push it back under the counter at the side of the display case. 

“I… don’t. But my manager wants me to stay a little later… because of it.” 

In spite of everything, a surge of energy seemed to hit Kai and the bottom of his stool made a loud _HONK!_ sound lurching across the floor when Kai jumped to his feet. Taehyun startled some, gripping the counter and feeling embarrassed and confused at how much he could make Kai react. He seemed to fill up so much space with brightness in such a small amount of time, grinning and nodding and raking a hand through his hair, Taehyun wasn’t sure if the sight of it made him want to laugh incredulously or shrink a little bit away. 

Even more than that, Taehyun got a buzz from it. He’d been caught off-guard by the almost reflexive response his own body had to energy radiating off of Kai. Every part of his skin was thrumming with his own blood as he realized his heart was still thundering.

“That’s okay!” Kai yipped like a puppy.

“That’s totally okay, I don’t have anywhere to be tonight! I was thinking, um, well, you know the park off of 13th? I go all the time—we can go wherever you want. We should.” 

Taehyun wanted to busy his hands some, so he crumpled up the remnants of his sandwich in the wax paper it came in and tossed it in the trash, then immediately grabbed the keys hanging on a hook behind the register to unlock the display case and begin rearranging nothing while he listened.

“My mom and my sister and I, we just moved here, so I actually haven’t seen a lot. So, like, anything is fine with me. Wherever you wanna go.”

Taehyun picked at the plastic wrapping around a cassette for a couple of seconds, then switched the cassette for another one sitting behind it.

“Where’re you from, Germany?” Taehyun mumbled at the glass. He was just saying words to give the life vibrating through him a direction. 

This kind of thing, whatever it was, had its own levels of complexity that Taehyun had only ever just fucking fumbled through his entire life. Yeonjun dubbed him as the smartest kid he’d ever met, but if Taehyun was being honest, he had no clue where Yeonjun’d gotten that from. The measure of true intelligence went beyond good work ethics and wanting to do well in college. Taehyun couldn’t be more exemplary of an idiot than when all the poor girls who he’d ever dated learned after a couple months that Taehyun never knew what the fuck he was doing there and probably never would for the sake of a relationship.

He was a dumbass through and through, like Beomgyu only worse. It was never on purpose and it did not make him cool.

Kai still laughed though, from above where Taehyun was squatting behind the display case. Kai laughed and leaned over the glass to look down at him, cornering Taehyun, starting to envelop him in his shadow while Taehyun’s heart beat in his ears and he could only shrink a tiny bit and hide behind his bangs.

“No. I’m from the town over.”

Mere seconds before Taehyun could explode, he heard a door slam from the back. He jerked his head up to find Yeonjun with a big box in his arms, his neck muscles bulging from the weight of it. His eyes flicked up and landed on Kai first, then immediately veered down towards the longboard resting upside down on the display case. His nostrils flared and Taehyun laughed inwardly at how fast his cheeks colored when he got angry. Pink-haired salvation.

“Hey!” Yeonjun barked across the store, all the bodies inside jumping out of their skin at the volume. 

“What did I tell you about putting the board on the display case!? You’re gonna mess up the glass!” 

Taehyun stood back up and Kai didn’t even look marginally concerned, his eyes were wide but he was still flushed, buzzing and glowing as he glanced at Taehyun and grinned.

“You changed your hair? Dude, it looks sick!” 

Time for smalltalk was rapidly ticking away, however, because Yeonjun scowled and started marching towards Kai poised like they both knew that if he threw the box he was holding at him, Kai would end up in the hospital. 

“I’m going, I’m going, shit!” 

Kai snatched his longboard from the off the top of the display, but he definitely wasn’t too careful about it as he beamed. Yeonjun’s glare morphed into shock and he actually started running. 

“I’ll come back at the end of your shift!” Kai said, glancing at Taehyun one last time as he rushed backwards towards the door.

“After nine, right? Ten after? I’ll be back!”

Taehyun only waved once, not wanting to side with the enemy with his manager around.

“I know I didn’t buy anything again but next time, I swear—” 

“ _Leave already_!” Yeonjun yelled. 

Kai finally stumbled the rest of the way out, the bells jingling before the door slammed, and when he was gone Taehyun expelled all the air he had no idea he’d been holding on to in one big breath. The two or three shop goers seemed to all sigh too, and the sound of soft rock trickled back into Taehyun’s senses. 

His heart was still hammering against the back of his sternum, but it was a bit nicer to him now that the thing actually had the chance to start slowing back down.

When Yeonjun reached the front counter he hefted the box onto it with a heave, wheezing after it was out of his hands then standing for a moment to catch his breath. Taehyun stepped closer to look into the box and almost immediately felt the comforting wash of serenity as he looked between all the rolled up tubes of posters and CDs he remembered they were gonna sort through and put out.

“We’re gonna set up a little section for swing, we just got a bunch of donated CDs in that genre and my dad said people are apparently listening to it.” 

Taehyun nodded and picked out a few names he didn’t recognize, running a thumb across the little unlabeled stickers each case had on its spine. Yeonjun started pulling cases out too, the pen that was behind his ear now in his hand as he squinted at each title. 

“We probably won’t be done until after closing, so I’ll just finish with Beomgyu and you can clock out at 9.” 

Taehyun fumbled for a split second with the case in his hand before he set it down, trying to will the blush that rose to his cheeks back off of his face. 


End file.
